Ruth Powys from Elephant Family spoke about the organisation’s work to make links with decision-makers in the UK and abroad, and reminded the audience present in Peter House, Manchester, of the plight the Asian elephant faces. In the last 100 years its habitat has declined by 95 per cent and its population by 90 per cent. Elephant Family is seeking to fundi elephant corridors, which reconnect fragments of forest after habitat has been sliced up. The price tag is enormous and, while the Indian government has announced £80m in next five years alone, at least 100m is needed. The organisation has set itself a target of raising £50m in next 10 years, government support is also crucial.
Mr Rajakhadar from the Indian High Commission in London emphasised the importance of elephants important in Indian culture. Mining, railways and general industrial development has certainly increased the pressures of the relationship between man and elephant. Elephant task force report which came out in August has set as its goals taking a more humane approach to elephants in captivity(of which there are around 3500 elephants) and conserving the numbers and habitat of elephants in the wild (around 26,000). Indian elephants make up about 60 per cent of Asian elephants altogether.
There are about 32 reserves where elephants have been sited in large numbers and which will be off limits to companies that mine. About 65000 km2 has been designated as elephant reserve. Also there has been elephant conservation authority created with membership drawn from different civic societies. Lastly, the elephant is to be declared as a national heritage animal.
Hilary Benn MP express his very strong support for the campaign Elephant Family is waging, especially the high visual impact of seeing the model elephants in everyday settings, which causes people to ask themselves what campaign lies behind them. He said that the international conference on the Asian elephant that Elephant Family is arguing for should be borne in mind next month at Nagoya, where there will at the conferennce looking at biodiversity targets. This will be a chance to reflect and to think about what targets to set going forward.
More broadly, said Benn, the world is coming face to face with doing things in an unsustainable way. The Asian elephant is part of, and victim to, that. From the elephant to the humble bumble bee – also on the wane, but also a creature playing a vital role in nature, helping keep crops and plant life going. Although manual pollination would be an enormous job creation opportunity it would never take the place of the role these vital creatures fill! The Easter islanders’ who turned all their trees to timber for the sake of statues and thus made their home uninhabitable are a stark reminder of the need for humans to live sustainably in the world. Human creativity and the passion of humankind will be needed to meet the challenges of future but we must not be like the Easter Islanders who destroyed their own environment.
Former MP Ian Cawsey congratulated former environment secretary Hilary Benn for the serious approach he took to animal welfare and remarked he must now be feeling some despair now at the badger cull. To paraphrase what David Miliband said earlier that day to conference, if progressives politics don’t win then the result for animals is a poor one.
Elephants eat 200kg food a day, 30 stone, so they need a habitat that enables them to sustain this! The loss of elephants in Asia and Africa has come from humans protecting what they think is theirs because they don’t see the bigger picture. It is important to help people develop lifestyles that are not in conflict with elephants. One in five people in the world live in or around elephant migratory routes. Elephants are too often seen as a problem that need to be moved on or eliminated.
Credit lending, crop protection, education and community awareness can all help. Education can really turn minds of people who have never thought a particular way about the issue before, as he has seen from his own visits to India. Labour in the UK needs to take a lead on this as the matter is tightly bound up with progressive politics internationally.
Thanks too to Emma Reynolds MP for chairing this event.